


Swarm’s Heart

by Notsalony



Series: Earth-95 [2]
Category: Sky High (2005), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: AU, Background - Freeform, Backstory, Character Development, Complete, Connections, Finished, Gen, One Off, Public Nudity, Side Story, done, power exploration, powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 09:50:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10089341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notsalony/pseuds/Notsalony
Summary: The Tale of how Swarm became a hero on Earth-95





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of the Flash High universe

 

I wasn’t always Swarm.  Back before the particle accelerator went off, I was Simon Birch, pizza delivery boy, who had a bit of a temper.  Actually a lot of people probably would have told you I was a hot head.  I’d just gotten stiffed on a tip and was kicking a wall in an alley way when the accelerator at Star Labs exploded.  It erupted and I remember seeing a guy in the air.  I was confused for a moment before I was on the ground screaming.  My scream drowned into a growl and I felt raw, skinned, and burned.  I crawled into an abandoned factory and the last thing I remember is wrapping something around me.  I didn’t realize I was cocooning myself.  All I knew was I wasn’t safe and I needed to wrap myself up to be safe.  But as I cocooned myself, some part of me knew that Micheal Bennet was dead, I wasn’t him anymore.  I wasn’t anyone anymore...   
  
I don’t know how long I slept in that cocoon.  Might have been a day, a week, a year... I really don’t know.  I do know if it hadn’t been for the splash of acid that hit my cocoon and a flash of lightning that hit it, I might not have ever gotten out of that cocoon.  Most of what happened next is a blur.  I know I was a super villain, or at least a meta monster named Bestial for a long while.  And I’m not sure how long I was there before they realized there was only really one option.  Ship me off world and make me someone else’s problem.  I remember the noise the portal made.  It was almost deafening to me.  And I landed in a forest on another world.  I didn’t care that I wasn’t on my home planet or world anymore.  I was just in a place that made sense now.  I was running wild in the forest for longer then I really have words for.  At peace for the first time since I woke up.   
  
I could run through the afternoon sun, feast on the animals in the forest.  Watch the lazy patterns of light in the dusk.  And sleep soundly every night knowing I was the biggest baddest thing in that forest.  It might have been months, it might have been years, but I was home and happy.  Of course that didn’t last long.  I was hunting in the morning for my breakfast, tracking the scent of something tasty when there was this snapping noise and I turned my great head and spotted this person.  He was standing there looking at me.  I felt angry.  Someone else was here.  It didn’t mater why he was here.  Just that he was and I didn’t like it.  I charged at him only to feel an upending pinch all over my body and run head first into a steel wall of a pit.  I looked around and couldn’t find any trace of the forest I’d been in except for the faint smells of it as it wafted past me...  I looked up at the people inside a glass box and growled at them.  They tried speaking at me but I didn’t understand human talk anymore.   
  
The one who made the snapping noise did it again and appeared down in the pit with me.  He had someone with him.  Tall pale smelled of pain... I was going to show them that this was beyond a stupid mistake and they’d die for having brought me here.  I charged at them but as I came with in range of the tall guy, he reached out a hand and put it on my forehead.  Instantly I stopped.  Oh... god it hurt.  Every cell of my body hurt.  My senses were getting stronger.  I was starting to see various patterns of light and smells and all manor of things as my body started to quiver and morph.  I’d been covered in fur and scales before but I felt myself getting bigger, stronger.  And he let go just before I passed out.  I’m not sure how long I slept but when I woke up they were trying to talk to me again.  This time I could sort of understand what they were saying.  But it was all drowning out to all the sensory information I was being flooded with.  But I got the gist of it.  The tall guy was coming back.  I lay there and let him walk up to me, laying hands on me again and instantly I gave a cry.   
  
My hearing, my sense of touch, the sense of taste... all of it was expanding and becoming so much greater then it was.  I was vaguely aware I was on the same Earth as the forest.  The energy in the air was the same.  I’d been able to sense that before, but now I could see the electromagnetic field of the earth with my eyes.  He let go and I passed out.  This became our norm for a while.  I’d lay there and get touched, and forcibly become evolved bit by bit, and he’d leave, tired, but fine.  I think they must have held me for a long time, I didn’t care.  I hurt too much to care.  I missed my forest.  I just wanted to go home.  I was pretty sure they knew that.  I understood them pretty easily now.  The tall dark haired guy who was in charge was mad that I wasn’t showing signs of evolution the way he’d been promised.  The tall pale guy was asking for more time.  I understood what was going on to an extent.  For some reason the dark haired guy wanted me to be evolved into something he could use.  But it wasn’t working right.  It was only making my beastial nature more evolved.  And the tall pale guy begged permission to try something else.   
  
He came down into the room with me and took some of my blood.  It hurt, but a lot less then him touching me.  He went back up to the glass room and showed the blood to his boss.  It was purple like it had been since I transformed, but he opened the vial and poured it on his hand.  I felt something... some sort... of ... connection.  I felt him.  Not in just my cells like when he touched me with his hands, but in my blood, in my dna... he was touching the very essence of me....  And then I screamed.  On and on I screamed as I curled in on myself.  He was changing me from the dna upwards.  He’d found something in my blood that gave him a direction to guide my evolution.  When he was done I was laying there naked, human, and confused, my senses still as heightened, but I was human again.   
  
They started coming in and running tests.  Looking at my eyes that had staid the same, yellow with their cross shaped pupil that seemed to have various lenses below that allowing me to see in various manors well beyond the human range.  I didn’t care.  They’d taken away the purity of my instinctual bestial form.  I wanted nothing to do with them or this life.  They seemed disappointed in my lack of interest in my new form or my life, or them for that matter. I barely ate, I barely slept.  I was letting myself die and I knew it.  I wanted to die.  I wanted out of this world once and for all.  Eventually all the tests stopped and I was left alone.  I figured they were done with me.  I’d failed and I was going to die like this now.  But eventually they shoved another person in with me.  And he seemed scared to death of me.  I didn’t care.  But I felt _him_ again.  Touching my blood and changing something in me.  I felt my hormones change and shift till I wasn’t as depressed, and he explained that all he wanted was for me to touch the other person.  So I did.  I touched him and the second our flesh touched I felt something I hadn’t noticed before.   
  
I couldn’t let go of him.  I could feel the tiny hair like filaments that came out of my skin as they sank into his.  And I was injecting him with something, something that was attaching his dna.  I felt him shiver and thrash as his back bowed and his body reshaped till he was an exact duplicate of my bestial form.  Tall and walking like a gorilla on his forearms, which ended in claws, the bony protrusions that broke through the fur and scales all over his back.  And those eyes so like mine looking at me.  But more then that I was in there with him.  I felt his mind dying and being swallowed up by my own.  I was still in that human body of mine but I was in this replica of my bestial form.  I could make it work as if it were my natural body.  And it was strange... as he seemed to be consumed by the beast I had been, his knowledge, and skills became mine.  I walked over and used his key code to open the door.  We walked out and when someone tried to stop us, I touched them, guards and others soon became my pack of beasts.  But more then that, it was like a hive set loose, a swarm of beasts that answered only to my psychic command. And the more I brought into our swarm, the more I knew about where I was being kept.   
  
I had a complete and detailed map of the base with in ten minutes of escaping, and enough security codes to get through any locked door.  I got outside and my beastial hulks with me when I turned around and input every single code back to back that was in my head.  Enough codes fast enough triggers the fail safe to lock down the base until someone can clear the system.  I watched it lock down and turned back and we headed out.  One of the people I’d transformed knew where my forest was, it took almost a week of walking, but we arrived.  We went to my old den and I made some modifications.  A place for my human body to be kept safe and then I’d ride the bestials minds out to hunt and gather, and we marked out my territory.  It was different but better in a way.  I’m not sure when I got used to being in human form and bestial form at the same time.  But I do know when I realized it was when I was out hunting in my human body.   
  
It took time to get used to the new shape and to move with the accuracy and grace I’d come to expect from my other bodies.  But I got there.  I was also more aware of their drones they flew into my area to watch us.  They knew where I was, and I didn’t care.  It wasn’t like they could touch me again, not with out becoming one of my bestials.  And we were unstoppable as a swarm.  And we would have kept going on that way, isolated from the world if it wasn’t for the day one of the bestials collapsed near the stream that boarded our territory to the north.  It was the first one I’d made.   
  
I wasn’t alone in his mind.  He was there again.  In pain and alone.  We traveled to him and I sat with him as he died.  His cells breaking down till he was just so much green meat that was dissolving in the afternoon sun.  I set the others to finding any drone in the air and catching it.  We knew their flight patterns by now.  I wanted to know why I’d lost Ira Hynkel just now.  I frowned.  His knowledge was still in the group.  I knew who he was and his whole life.  I reached out to the others and felt the signs of impending break downs in all of them.  They were going to go in order.  Jeffery Watkins was going to be next.  I looked at him and felt his mind slipping.  It wouldn’t be long now.  I had him come back to me, deciding this would be where I buried them.  As he came he brought the drone with his hand over the lens.  I took it from him and pointed it at myself.   
  
“Why.” I turned it around and pointed it at the last of Ira’s form and then at Jeffery as he started to panic and break down, I entered his mind and held him mentally to calm him and got him to lay beside Ira’s body till he was too gone to care.  And then he was gone entirely.  Turning the drone back to me I looked right into it.  “WHY?” I growled.  I reached out and felt Tara Shannon.  She’d been a brilliant engineer I’d caught on my way out.  Using her knowledge and rudimentary tools I created I opened the drone up and activated it’s speech systems, and using the backdoor that Sharron Beck had put into their system for when she was trying to look things up with out anyone at the base knowing, I hacked into their security feed and then into the coms so I could talk to the one person I thought might help.   
  
“WHY?” I growled and saw them jump as it appeared on every screen, and I showed the bodies.  “Why this happen.” My voice was gravely from lack of use.    
  
“Dear god...” I heard his voice.   
  
“Doctor Evo... WHY?” I watched him look around.   
  
“How does he know my...”   
  
“Name?” I asked and everyone stopped.  “I have the combined knowledge of twenty six of your people in my head now Doctor.” I was getting better at speaking human again.  “I know how to take these drones apart and rebuild them so I can see your every move and hear you talk.  I know how to get in and out of that building a hundred different ways.  And I know all your personal histories with every single person I took into my swarm.” I looked at the camera.  “So why are they dying now?”   
  
“I... I don’t know.  I...”   
  
“Doctor.” I frowned.  “Are you aware that thanks to your evolutionary powers I’m capable of detecting a great deal more then you realized.  I know you’re lying.”   
  
“It’s the forced cellular construct.”   
  
“Because I transformed them.”   
  
“They’re not as stable as you.  I don’t know why.  Frankly I don’t know how you were stable in the first place.  Or how you got...”   
  
“Not from this Earth.”   
  
“What...” He looked shocked.   
  
“From an Earth where I was a pizza delivery boy.  A particle accelerator exploded and I got hit by some sort of wave.  It burned my body badly.  I was burned, disfigured, and hurting.  I crawled into a warehouse and cocooned myself for years inside that warehouse...” I frowned.  “I think that’s why I was stable.  I had years to change and adapt and grow.  They’re all as unstable as my first form was.”   
  
“That would make sense.  If you could get one of them to cocoon themselves as they start to degrade they might be savable.”   
  
“They’re all starting to degrade.” I pointed the camera at the entire swarm.  “We will make a cocoon.” I put the drone down and left the area, taking them into the hilly area where we’d build a secondary den.  One by one I made them cocoon themselves into a spot in the wall and I buried them.  I felt their minds go still, not dead, but done fully awake, and felt their bodies breaking down inside the cocoon.  Slower, more stable.  They’d have to be with in the cocoons for years...  I sealed up the den and made it look like there had never been one there before, then walked back to the drone and picked it up.   
  
“Still there doctor?”   
  
“Yes... yes I am... I...”   
  
“Send the teleporter back after me.  Tell him to wear gloves.  I’ll go back.  Things will be different this time.   
  
“Are they...”   
  
“Cocooned, and safe.  It’ll take years of sitting in their cocoons before they can come out.  Till then I want to learn who and what I am.” The guy from before popped into being.  He was around my height, darker skin, almost the color of a latte, all smiles and talking.  Had he talked before?   
  
“We going to have an easier ride then before?  I mean, you were trying to kill me the last time we did this.”   
  
“Wasn’t trying to kill you.” I shrugged.  “I just wanted to ensure you knew who’s territory you were in.” I walked up to him, my inhuman eyes studying him, he was odd, as if he was being pulled in multiple directions at once.  Human eyes wouldn’t have seen it.  But one of the lenses deep in my eyes allowed me to see things at almost a time elapsed photography session.  And I could see the jerky distortions his powers caused him.  “So long as no part of me touches your bare skin we should be fine.  Otherwise you’ll turn into one of my drones.”   
  
“Gotcha.  Okay, one quick ride then.” He smacked his hand down on my chest and I found myself in the room I’d been in, but it was changed, they’d set it up like an enclosure, built off of designs of my den in the wild.  I settled down and waited.  It didn’t take long for Doctor Evo to walk in.  He laid out my training schedule, and what he would expect from me.  And we would work to discover my limits and what I wanted out of this.  It was a hard grueling couple of months and at the end I emerged as Swarm one of Earth-95’s heroes.  They implanted a backstory for me, a history, a childhood here, and even found my doppelgängers’ family and set things up with them so if anyone went looking they’d find the history and believe it.  And I began fighting crime here as a hero.  I even joined the school, Sky High, as part of my cover here.  I am Metatron’s hand in this world.  And for now, I don’t get to know why I’m on the board, just that I am, and to make friends and connections through out the league and get them to trust me...   
  
But my instincts are telling me to be more then careful.  To plan a head.  Because I know there is more to Metatron then meets the eye.  No one knows how far Evo’s evolved me, or how powerful my eyes really are.  Or that I can use them in combination to see all sorts of things.  My favorite trick is to use multiple drones to look in different sights and see something in all my senses at once.  I’ve seen Metatron’s face.  I know he’s not what he seems... and I know he will discard me and my swarm with out a moment’s thought.  I have to find allies I can trust.   
  
Though the one time I’ve had to use my power on a villain who was getting too damn close to knowing what was going on, when I incorporate a power into the swarm, their power becomes part of the swarm.  I’ve had to hide the power I’ve taken into myself.  But I do have one card up my sleeve.  I can feel the swarm I’ve kept in the cocoons beginning to stir... as they wake my swarm prepares to take it’s place at my side, and with any luck, they will be enough to turn the tide in our favor... but I often wonder.  Will it be enough?

**Author's Note:**

> I’m thinking about doing one of these for each character so you get a sense of who they are, just a little one off connector story so you can know some of the hundreds of details in my head that are swirling around. And to help you understand what all is going on.


End file.
